Instantly Cassius began to sweat and gnaw his lip. The murky red circles would be invisible from the prison. He had difficulty seeing them himself. Radar lamps indicated a very costly vehicle. Something with a lot of equipment inside, like the mobile surgery and consultation rooms so many personal-injury lawyers drove. Gently Cassius levered up the vent in the Aircoupe blister.
He thought he heard voices. He certainly heard the gutter and clank of a machine. They’d brought their own gravedigger.
Twice its black arms flashed across the circles of the red radar lenses, illusory, quick as a blink. Cassius was now desperately afraid the thieves were vicious mobsters, revanchist foreign agents or something equally deadly. He slipped the card into the slot, heard the compressors begin to whoosh. Gently, gently, he levered the Aircoupe out of parking contact with the ground, ready to race in pursuit.
The thieves took twice as long as the prison detail. From this Cassius inferred they had dug up the coffin, then replaced the earth so their work would go undetected. As the thoroughness of their operation hit him, he found himself suddenly pumped full of adrenalin and rage. When the radar lenses vanished, indicating the truck’s departure, he was ready.
He jerked the Aircoupe into forward. He picked them up on the feeder leaving the burial ground.
Apparently because of the snow or the solitude of the countryside or both, they never suspected he was roughly a mile behind them on the long trip over the state line into Westport, one of the cancerous slums affixed to the body of Greater Manhattan.
The truck whizzing along on its air jets finally slowed on a seamy street. It pulled into the side drive of a ramshackle funeral parlor and disappeared in the rear. Under a lonely mercury light a sign reading Commuter’s Rest Mortuary Chapel stood on the unkempt, snow-patched lawn.
Cassius cruised half a block down, parked and waited.
The truck never came out.
The windows of the place were black. Painted over? There was absolutely no sign of life. As false dawn broke, Cassius got away from there. He relaxed only when he was on the Washington Belt North. He licked his lips, fought his tiredness, struggled with what he must do next.
The police?
Yes, that was the sensible answer. But something in him rebelled.
After all, he’d invested nearly a year on the chase, which was now hotting up considerably. Had Timothy not been involved, he’d have reported to the authorities at once. But the authorities hadn’t done much of anything for him the first time. He still resented it.
Had he the guts to carry it one step more and see what happened?
Well, maybe he hadn’t the guts. But he had the will. Months of frustration had developed it.
Once back in his flat, he was bothered again. He was the only person who knew the location from which the ring operated. Whom could he tell? Joy?
He warned himself off. Fond as he was of Joy, he knew his lady-love would try to convert the dross of a personal cause into the gold of self-promotion via a hot story. Tell her, and half Washington would know before he reached the Commuter’s Rest Mortuary Chapel again.
As he pondered alone in his littered room, his eye struck the boxes of notes for his book. All at once the project seemed trivial.
What if—just supposing—he uncovered some sensational facts over there in Connecticut? Some monstrous conspiracy? He assumed he was the only one who knew anything about the underground organization, whatever its purpose. Certainly he was the only reporter. Opportunity beckoned. So did faint greed, he admitted.
Greed was unfamiliar to him—but probably only because of lack of opportunities. Hell, what harm would it do to write the expose himself, if there was one to be written? Why shouldn’t he get the credit for doing all the work and taking all the risks?
First, though, he must protect himself.
Next morning, instead of taking the usual vitamin break, he said to Joy, “I have to go out for a few minutes.”
Joy folded up the edition of the paper she’d been studying. The front page carried a simulphoto of two cabinet members, the Secretary of Social Security and the Secretary of Fringe Benefits, cutting ribbons to open the new: Birth Defects Insurance Administration Center.
“What’re you after, love?” Joy asked. “Another dusty book that mentions your favorite colonel in small type in the appendix?”
“I need a new diary.”
“Oh, that. You’re a great one.”
“Why do you say that?”
She pinched his arm, oblivious to the others in the newspaper mess. “I prefer my reflections printed in public, sweets, with my name above them, ten point or better. Cash in the bank is what I’m after.”
Cassius grinned. “How do you know my diary won’t make me famous one day?”
“That’s what all diary-writers think. How many make it?”
Admitting she was right, and promising to meet her for lunch, Cassius left. He hurried down to an arcade on the fourth sub-level of the newspaper building. He bought an expensive diary at a stationery shop. The diary in which he’d been writing lately wasn’t filled. But it was just a plain lockless diary. The one he purchased had a sonic lock: the first nine notes of the old folk song Mister Clean, whistled. The lock was tamperproof.
That night, after dinner with Joy, he went home and wrote down the events at the Ossining burial ground, as well as the location of the headquarters of the ring. Then he locked the new diary and went to bed, and dreamed the dog dream vividly.
The next night he set out for Connecticut.
He was unarmed. He was rather frightened. But he went.
He parked the Aircoupe down the block and walked. The moon was full. A gusty wind blew. Even here in the stews, where one tumbledown split-level housed a dozen squealing, fighting families, there was a sense and tang of earth’s annual renewal. The wind carried the sweet breath of life. Turning up the mortuary walk, Cassius was suddenly conscious that he was approaching the age when men had instantly mortal coronaries.
He stopped on the walk, his uplifted face moon-bathed, almost sad. The black dog seemed somewhere near.
He knocked quietly. He’d decided he wasn’t the type to wave a gun or kick at locks. But his jaw fell when the door opened promptly.
Under a weak light stood a tall, rather soft man with receding hair, rimless glasses and brilliant blue eyes. The man wore grimy clothing. He looked slightly familiar.
“See here, my name is Cassius Andrews—”
“Of course,” the man cut in. He smiled understanding. “There’s no need to take that tone. I’ve almost expected you to show up one day.”
He held out his hand. “Come in, come in! Incidentally, my name is Kagle. Dr. Frederic.”
* * * *
VII
Before budging from the stoop, Cassius had to still his suspicions. “I mean to say, Kagle, what I came about is my brother. I want to know what happened to his body.”
“Of course,” the other repeated, as if it were only natural. “I’ll be glad to tell you everything, Andrews. Not here on the doorstep, though. Come in and—oh.” Frederic Kagle’s eyes were intense and unwavering as blue gas flames. They took in Cassius’s nervous glance at the dingy shadows in the hall. Dr. Kagle’s manner became wry. “I see now. You expected something else. You still do. The latter-day Mafia or its equivalent. This is a perfectly legitimate research establishment.”
And he reached around Cassius to grasp the door with a left hand whose ring finger bore the faint red ghost of a removed wedding band. He kept talking.
“We’re a little under cover, I must admit. But we have our problems. I think you’ll appreciate them once I explain. That is, if you’ve got the stomach to hear it all.” A challenging glance. “Being a newsman, dedicated to truth in principle if not always in practice—I’m only speaking generically, of course—you should have an open mind if anyone does.”
A small, confident smile played on Kagle’s mouth. Cassius noted, however, that he se
cured the night chain on the door.
“I have to take your word that this operation is legitimate,” Cassius said defensively. Kagle spun, peering hard. Cassius felt uncomfortable, as though he’d been tested and found wanting.
“Legitimate by my lights, is what I meant,” Kagle said. “Some—my ex-wife among others—don’t agree. I’ll leave it up to your sense of fairness.”
Cassius was fully aware of what Kagle was doing: using soft soap. But he was disarmed, temporarily anyway. Kagle led the way down the corridor which plainly hadn’t been greatly renovated since the days when the place served as the final rest of thrombosis-stricken executives. Through two different doors jumbles of laboratory equipment winked faintly in the dark.
A third door was open, lighted. Kagle closed it quickly. He frowned, as over a minor annoyance. But not before Cassius had glimpsed more glass and metalware, and two men in spotted white coats.
One had been bending over sympathetically. The other had been seated on a stool, head on his forearms on a lucite bench, crying.
“Our work does have its personal problems too,” Kagle said. He rolled back scrolled oak double doors. “Even dedicated people get shaky over the moral aspects now and then.” He stood aside, waiting for Cassius to pass. Cassius caught the renewed flicker of blue intensity in the man’s eye. The calm fire said that Kagle, a dedicated man, was not to be lumped with those who wallowed in shakiness.
Kagle rolled the doors shut again behind them.
The room was large, full of cheap, sharp-angled metal office furniture. A solar tube had been jerry-rigged in the wall. It shed a white, uncompromising light over all. The only signs of the room’s former function were thick, threadbare carpeting, rose-petal wallpaper peeled in many places and an ancient framed motto, I Am the Light of the World, under which someone had taped a photo of some sort of molecular model.
Kagle circled the desk. He sat down, indicated Cassius’s place.
“I think I’d better stand,” Cassius said. “I didn’t come here to be social.”
“My dear Mr. Andrews,” Kagle said gently, “you have every right to feel as you do. We should never have selected your brother. It was a mistake.”
“Yes, it was. For you.”
The scientist ignored the feigned toughness. “Ordinarily we try to choose people with no survivors. Last year, however, I had a fellow working for me.” The blue-flame eyes brightened merrily. “My, shall we say, traffic manager? He proved to be an idiot. But he was all I could get. Now I handle that end myself. And have, ever since he slipped up a couple of times. One of his worst slip-ups was your brother the Reverend. It meant thirty hours’ worth of work in a day instead of my usual twenty-six. But that’s all right.”
Cassius didn’t do Kagle the favor of smiling even a little. “I want to know what you did with him.”
Kagle didn’t seem worried, just more amused. “So you can report us to the authorities?”
“Maybe. Well?”
Kagle pursed his lips. “Mr. Andrews, are you really tough enough to stand the truth?”
“I’m a newspaperman. I guess that qualifies me a little.”
“Provided I tell you everything about your brother— which will mean in turn telling you everything about what we do here, and why I’m reduced to crawling out at night like some roach just so I can conduct a perfectly legitimate scientific study—will you promise in return not to write one word about what I say?”
Abruptly Cassius sat down. He fought to keep a straight face. A moment ago he’d been cowed by the man’s assured, almost jocular manner. Now it was his turn to feel like laughing.
If the man was indeed a scientist, he was the stereotype: foolish, naive, unworldly beneath his veneer of hard-lipped dedication. What a hell of a stupid offer! Did Kagle honestly think he would pass up a chance for an expose now that he had the material practically in his hands? He had to write what he learned. For Timothy’s sake.
And for his own, too. He’d seen a glimmer of a real chance to improve his lot. Such a chance hadn’t come his way in longer than he could remember. He’d almost believed he was no longer interested in opportunities. Sitting across from Kagle, he discovered otherwise.
Carefully, softly, he lied, “All right, Dr. Kagle. If that’s your price, I promise.”
The sap fell for it at once. “Thank you.”
Why were the blue eyes merry a moment? Or was it a trick of the light? Kagle tented his fingers, leaned across the desk.
“First tell me how you found me.”
“No harm in that, I guess.” Cassius described his speculations, starting with those initiated the night he heard Madame Wanda Kagle ranting. “I’ll admit I didn’t dream she really had any connection with you. Or with Timothy. It was just sort of a—well, trigger.”
Kagle shook his head. “Poor sis. She badgered me until I showed her.”
A trickle of sweat, unbidden, rolled down Cassius’s cheek. “Showed her what?”
“The results of our research here into the nature of death.”
“The nature of—?” Cassius’s eyes bugged.
Dr. Kagle leaned back, chuckling. His pink forehead shone. “There it is again. You imagine we’re a bunch of necrophiles, don’t you? Nothing so debased, Mr. Andrews, though in certain quarters we’re certainly regarded in that light. What we’re doing is simply probing the experience of dying from a qualitative standpoint. I could give you a long lecture on the theory. But in plainest terms, our work is this. I’m a neurosurgeon by training. What I do with all the dead bodies I’m forced to steal is analogous to what a man in a darkroom does when he develops film. He brings forth the latent image. A photo’s latent image is both there and not there, in the silver. It awaits the right combination of chemicals before it becomes visible. So with the—” Dr. Kagle hesitated a second, as if gauging Cassius’s nerve again. “—call it the latent image of death. Or images. The sensory record of the last microseconds before the mind blacks out. All the pain. All the smells, tactile sensations. The blurred sights. When I was killing time as just another white-coated bureaucrat with the Institutes of Health, I worked out techniques which would parallel the first formulation of the proper photochemicals. And that’s why I need the bodies, Mr. Andrews. What good is a darkroom technician without exposed film?”
Kagle paused. “Do you want me to go into the surgical and electronic techniques more deeply?”
“No. Let me get this straight.” Cassius was sweating hard. “You’re able to take someone’s—corpse—and from it get a record of what it felt like for that person to die?”
“That is more or less it, yes. The process involves a great deal of painstaking surgery, much work with computers and video tape and sound-recording equipment. I tried to get the Institutes to underwrite the initial study. Naturally they wouldn’t, they didn’t dare. You’re too young—and so am I, though perhaps I don’t look it—to remember the DNA Riots when Gadsburry finally created one single cell in his lab. I’m sure you’ve read about the riots often. Old illusions die hard, Mr. Andrews. Some of mine died, too, when I first took up this field. I wanted to work legally. Obtain legitimate corpses in the manner of a private medical school.”
“Couldn’t you?”
The blue-flame eyes brightened. “A court order obtained by a committee of certain members of the clergy in this country frustrated my efforts. I decided it was prudent to go underground, so to speak. To steal the bodies I needed. After all, I’m convinced in my own mind that the work is necessary, important. And honest. Men have been martyred before. I’m prepared to be martyred myself, though of course I prefer to avoid it.”
More amusement suddenly. “And I’ve discovered it won’t be necessary, either, Mr. Andrews.”
“Isn’t this very expensive research?”
“Frightfully.”
“Then where—?”
Kagle shrugged. “Patents. Three big ones, several small ones. Neurosurgical apparatus. The royalties are more than a
mple.”
Cassius said, “But I don’t really understand why you chose to work in this particular field.”
Kagle sounded sad. “After I stumbled across the fundamental technique, it wasn’t a matter of choosing.”
“Your reason is—?”
“To know. What else?”
“I can see why the clergy would stand in your way.”
“Frankly,” Kagle snapped, “I can’t. I’m not in any way tampering with their precious concepts of immortality. Of course I am in a position to state that, as far as sentient experience goes, there is no immortality after the act of death. The neural latent images are feeble at best by the time I’m through scrounging for the bodies. And they quickly go altogether. Yet even though I resent the opposition, I’ve tried to be circumspect. Picked subjects who fit my requirements—a violent death, for maximum image strength—but have no relatives or family. I’ve done this partly out of vestigial moral considerations, partly from a practical wish to avert discovery and continue my studies as long as possible. With your brother, as I stated, the fool I had working for me slipped up. You were shrewd enough to locate me. Therefore I’ll hide nothing, Mr. Andrews. I’m no criminal.”
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